This study looks at how three religious thinkers in the Russian émigré community, Nicholas Berdyaev, Georges Florovsky and George Fedotov, imagined the Medieval as a model for Russian culture abroad in interwar Paris. Each thinker constructs a narrative of origin for the current crisis of the Russian diaspora, a crisis that is, for all three, primarily spiritual. Images and texts from the medieval provide a blueprint for religious life in Paris and a broader corrective to the religious and theological fallacies of modernity.
Looking at polemical and scholarly texts, I demonstrate how the émigré community self-consciously created and perpetuated the (new) Middle Ages as a historical reality and an imagined golden age. I argue that their medieval models functioned to create a narrative of historical and cultural continuity with Russia, the West and antiquity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/d8-cwzz-d211 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Pheiffer, Brittany Paige |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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